This blog describes an information engineering approach to online education in the network age.
There are two basic premises.
1. In electronic form, information can be produced, consumed, moved, copied, searched, tagged, classified, pushed, pulled, re-routed, mashed, broadcast, networked, syndicated, federated, mediated, transformed, destroyed, studied, ignored...
2. Knowledge is induced by information.
Taken together, these two statements strongly suggest that a model of teaching and learning should have information at or very near its centre.
This is the starting point of the information engineering approach to online teaching and learning.
The term itself emerged as an obvious label for two major reasons.
Firstly, it distinguishes the field from the information processing model of teaching and learning which is principally a cognitive model. In information engineering, both the cognitive and exocognitive aspects of processing information are important features. There is also a strong emphasis on the idea of knowledge being induced by information. This shifts the aim of constructing teaching materials as representations of knowledge to materials that can induce knowledge. This induction of knowledge relates to the concept of implicit (or distributed) knowledge.
Secondly, the information-as-thing model is adopted. That is, information is treated as a commodity that can be engineered much in the same way that a chemical engineer deals with the processing of oil or coal.
Over the past 20 years or so, direct instruction or instructivism has been increasingly overshadowed by teaching methods based on constructivist models of knowledge and learning. Information engineering offers a more balanced approach between instructivist and constructivist models based on ideas drawn from attention theory.
The term information engineering has been used before principally in the business field relating to how an organisation deals with information. This overloading should not lead to any confusion.
The idea of an information channel sits well with the idea of information-as-thing. Each information channel transports information in a particular format between two termini. Information channels are characterised by many features: for example, the form of the information, the transport mechanism, and the security technology.
The term cognitve tool has become heavily overloaded in the fields of cognition, teaching and learning, and the extended mind. To minimise confusion it has proved useful to introduce the idea of exocognitive processing of information using exocognitive tools.
The set of exocognitive tools that a student uses to produce, consume and process information provides a model for learning styles that is more suited to the information age than existing models.
Attempting to second guess the set of tools that will become popular with students in the construction of their PLEs is likely to be a fruitless task. Hence, it would not be wise to try to build PLEs for students. Let students develop their own PLEs and then define the relationship between the institutional VLE and the PLE in terms of information channels. The VLE should aim to provide information channel manifolds that optimise the chances of hitting the range of formats that are compatible with the tools in the PLE. There are obvious VLE architectures and technologies that are particularly suited for creating these manifolds and for rapidly adding new channels according to the changing needs of students.
The cognitive hole is a term that has been coined to refer to an aliquot of implicit knowledge. Implicit knowledge in this case is a type of distributed knowledge in which the distributed domain is the single mind. This type of distributed knowledge is a well-defined concept in epistemic logic where the distribution is defined to be over two or more agents. In this case the agents are different processing units in the same mind.
A cognitive hole represents a cognitive state that can be reached using current knowledge. For example, if a person knows A and B which can be combined to form C then C, before the learning act, is a cognitive hole (implicit knowledge). If there are sensorimotor aspects to the learning then the cognitive holes can be looked on as competence holes.
A directed graph can be created to represent a teaching and learning workflow, or learning design, in which there is a sequential filling of cognitive holes.
This type of directed graph has been christened a kungkhie.
All the topics mentioned above will amplified in further posts.
No comments:
Post a Comment